AI Can Now Rebuild Images From Brain Scans. What If Your Dreams Don’t Stay Private?

3 min read Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: For years, scientists have trained AI to read fMRI scans to accurately reconstruct visual information.

The researchers revealed Brain-IT, an AI model capable of reconstructing mental images with a scary level of accuracy—using only brain-scan data.

It needs vast amounts of data to draw inferences from, and fMRI scans paired with images are in painfully short supply.

So the researchers developed a decode/encode method where the model could both decode an image from these brain scans and also predict what brain scans might look like based on just an image alone.

And by altering the images, it’s possible to compare differences between predicted fMRI scans to uncover the brain’s underlying behavior.